by Allan Massie
Hogg was with me on that occasion, and it became one of his favourite stories. Alas, Will Watherston did no more than give Davie Brunton a good dunt on the head, and the pair lived to trouble the parish for a good many years.
9
A Strange Encounter and Thoughts on the Nature of Civilization, 1826–7
Tonight, coming away from a dinner of the Friday Club, which I myself was responsible for founding half a lifetime ago, I found myself in the mood for solitude and shook free of my fellows to wander the night-streets on my own. If they wondered at my unaccustomed lack of sociability – or rather at my abrupt willingness to divorce myself from their society, for till this fit came over me, I had been merry enough, and had tackled the game pie, claret and whisky with as good a will as any, while not being remiss in contributing what I could to the merriment of the conversation – why then, I could not have explained myself; and must have answered them with some offhand jest.
I had been alone for some quarter of an hour perhaps, and had made my way up the Canongate, before I admitted to myself where I was heading, and so turned by Moray House, through a close, down some steps, and headed for the Cowgate. It was not my expectation that the scene which I had visioned in Hastie’s Close would repeat itself. If I had been certain that it would I might have directed my steps elsewhere, or clung close to my companions of the night. Yet, as soon as I confessed my purpose to myself, I knew an eagerness which has long been foreign to me.
I advanced in some trepidation. Mist hung around the rooftops, and the silence and solitude seemed unnatural.
Oh loth to hear the sound of pipe,
Of fiddle or of drum,
But yet some dancing spirit seems
To beckon me to come.
The close was deserted. I mounted the steps to where I had seen the figures, and the world retreated from me. I felt the hollow chill of absence. I leaned against the damp wall, and listened, listened for the music that had led me on and was now denied me. Then it was as if a hand, chill and wringing wet as a grave-cloth, was pressed upon my brow. Fingers explored my cheeks, and my mouth was dry. This impression too vanished from me, and I could only suppose I had imagined it. Still I waited, as if I had been promised a tryst, and like a lover torn between jealousy, hope and despair, refused to accept that it was denied me.
Then, just at the moment when I was about to depart, feeling, with a reluctance for which I cannot account, cheated, and conscious too that I had made a fool of myself, I began to shiver. The shivering was uncontrollable, like one in the grip of fever. I was at the same time burning hot and icy cold, though how these two sensations could be simultaneously experienced is more than I can rationally comprehend. Yet it was so. And then my ears were assailed by the sound of weeping. It was a woman, I think, though could not be certain. The creature’s distress was acute, but her – I am sure the voice was female – lamentation failed to express itself in words . . . I have heard such keening in a Highland cottage where a corpse lay awaiting burial, but there was an intensity, an urgency, to the grief that now disclosed itself to me, that made such wailing lamentation seem contrived and artificial. It was as if whoever wept wept now, not only for herself, not even only for me, but for all the race of men. That is fanciful, and there is no one to whom I could confess it. I was filled with pity, but that emotion was soon succeeded by fear, as a consciousness of a surrounding evil pressed hard upon me. Then, while I still shook and sweated and shivered, and listened rapt to that unearthly, and yet all too human, pain and sorrow, there was silence all of a sudden, the poor creature being cut off in midstream. I knew a momentary relief, but this was shattered by what followed: a mocking laughter as if of a troop of devils.
I do not think I fainted, but I have no clear recollection of how I got myself away, of what resolution it took to compel my feet to move, or of how, leaning heavily as I must have done, on my stick, I made what I can think of only as my escape.
Now, back in my lodgings, in my dressing-gown, with a cheroot alight, and a glass of toddy to hand, my puzzlement remains as extreme as the impulse which drove me thither is obscure. I have looked through some old books recounting Edinburgh crimes and legends, and can find nothing to explain it, no story of terrible murder or dark deeds committed there: and I am certain that if I had knocked on the door of one of the inhabitants of the close, they would have been deaf to what I heard.
And yet I heard it. I did not imagine it. I am certain of that. There was evil in the air:
Oh I will show you where the white lilies grow
On the banks of Italie . . .
I had been moderate in my consumption of wine and whisky, as I generally am now, for I am nervous of the fits of giddiness which are like to overtake me. There is no one to whom I can recount this experience, for my old friends would look pityingly at me and, no doubt, depart shaking their heads and muttering sadly that I am no longer the man I was. I could not speak of it even to Lockhart, my dear son-in-law, in whom I have come to repose more confidence than in any other man. He is of too rational and sensible a cast of mind; and he too would be pained by what he would, I am sure, regard as evidence of a tendency to some nervous indisposition, even crisis. James Hogg would be bluff and consoling.
‘Aye, Shirra,’ he would say, ‘there’s nae doot in my opeenion that you hae been assailed, marked oot and assailed, by some emissary o the deil. I mind fine the same thing happening to me masel . . .’ for it is one of Hogg’s amiable characteristics that no awful thing can happen to any of his acquaintance, but he has had an experience to match or surpass it. Besides, I cannot share his certainty – I mean, the certainty that he would have – that the Devil exists, or could conceivably take any interest in such as me.
I remember though – the memory creeping back to me like mist rising from the Tweed in late November afternoons – that as I leaned against that wet wall, I tried to pray, and no words came.
It is foolish to perplex myself with this matter, and yet I cannot rid myself of it. If it was indeed my imagination playing a vile trick on my mind, then my fear is all the greater. It is poor Swift again, dying from the top.
But why was I so determined to go there, my determination being, I now realize, all the stronger for my refusal for so long to confess my purpose to myself?
I have no fear of death. I believe I can say that with complete honesty. I trust in the Lord, without making any public profession of my faith, and I trust also that I shall be raised redeemed into life everlasting, though as to what form this will take, I confess myself devoid even of any capacity for intelligent speculation.
If there is truly any evil – spirit, I suppose I must say – that lurks there, it is folly to expose myself to it; yet it is the sort of folly that acts upon one like a drug. Even as I sit at my desk, my cheroot drawing bonnily, I am conscious of a powerful temptation to return – and then what? Face it out? There is no sense in such thoughts.
I have often been questioned, of course, about my attitude to the supernatural, and I have generally managed to fob my questioners off with some easy or evasive answer: to the effect, for instance, that such beliefs in demons, brownies, ghosts and bogles, are natural in a primitive state of society, but must, in equally natural fashion, evaporate with the progress of civilization. I have, though I rarely care to speak of my own works, remarked that in what I must consider the best piece of fiction in this vein which I have written – the story of Wandering Willie, which is encased in Redgauntlet – I have been careful, even while seeking to give my readers a taste of the macabre, to offer at the same time a rational explanation which does not offend common sense. That has seemed to me the only manner in which someone today can treat such matters, without making himself absurd by a display of credulity. It is quite different though when a man finds himself assailed in perplexity . . .
Aye, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot . . .
That fear of death, expressed
so chillingly by Claudio, is natural enough. That is a very human fear, which, however well-founded a man’s faith, must from time to time strike him. This new fear of mine is of a different order. It is not a fear of death, but rather a terror of being seized by something horrid and destructive, while still alive; of finding myself no longer the man I was, but possessed of another spirit, another incomprehensible being. For the truth is first, that I was eager that the scene which I saw on my earlier visit to the close should repeat itself; and true also that what I experienced on this occasion represented a progression to something worse, something still more vile. I acknowledge that and, doing so, know that I shall be driven to tempt fate by returning thither. But not tonight. It would not be serviceable to return tonight. Tonight’s work, I am satisfied, is done.
We are not all of a piece. There is in man an inescapable and terrible duality, inherent in our nature. I have fought against this knowledge, against its recognition. I had thought to have escaped the black doom of Scotch Calvinism, with its brutal and arbitrary division of mankind into the Elect and the damned, which I have always found a repellent and presumptuous dogma. Yet, it comes to me now, when I woke this morning – or yesterday morning, as I see from the growing light it now is – I seized a glass from the table by my bed, and scrutinized my face – something I have never done in my life before on waking, and indeed I do not know how the glass came to be there – and for why? To see that I was the same man, wearing the same face, as had gone to bed.
If I told poor Anne that, she would look at me with terrified vague eyes, as the poor girl sometimes does. Seeing me daily, or near daily, when I was last at Abbotsford, I detected fear in her countenance, and I interpreted it as a fear that her father was not what he had been, but on the course to something worse. Her fear angered me. I felt my brows contract, and more than once it was all I could do to refrain from a sharp speech which the poor lass had done nothing to deserve. She was silent on the matter, but I do not believe it was my imagination that saw the fear start in her eyes.
I am proud of my children, and believe I love them as a father should. They are good bairns, all of them, and yet it has occurred to me as strange and worthy of remark that I often feel easier with those who are comparatively strangers, aye, and closer to them, than I do where my own bairns are concerned. I do not believe this sensation to be uncommon. A man feels his children to be part of himself, and yet they remain separate; they remain the other. They are flesh of a man’s flesh, yet not his flesh. Their very closeness accentuates the difference between him and them. I do not know if women feel this way, and suspect they may not; but a man does – I do, and it pains and troubles me. Still I am sure it is natural, for it is also natural that a child in some degree should reject his or her father, if only to avoid domination.
Others have recognized this. Read through Shakespeare and you will scarce find one connection between parent and child which is devoid of resentment and misunderstanding. The very closeness of the relationship seems to insist on it.
Merrily danced the Quaker’s wife,
And merrily danced the Quaker;
But the Quaker’s lad went off to the wars,
A sad surprise for the Quaker.
Anne is a good lass, but if she now finds me a burden she would be glad to be free of, I canna blame her.
And, one has also to consider, when contemplating the bairns, by what obscure concatenation of circumstance they come to be as they are. They spring from my loins, but also, and more importantly, from their mother’s womb; and had I married someone else, had I married Williamina, my children would have been quite different from what they are. The thought may be trite; nevertheless, it is odd to reflect that in these circumstances, none of them – not Walter or Charles, Sophia or Anne – would exist. So time and chance, in the words of the Preacher, govern all – even to the making of particular men and women.
How easy, dwelling on such a thought, it might be to believe in predestination – a perilous thought, for that doctrine can engender a most disagreeable arrogance, a certainty which nothing in common experience can justify, a self-righteousness that has been the curse of Scotland as the unco gude wallowed in their assurance that they were the favourites of the Almighty. I reject it, as I rejected the narrow – though in my father’s case, benevolent – Calvinism in which I was bred. Yet there are moments, in the owl-light, when I feel upon me the controlling influence of an impersonal fate. In the mirk silence, prophecies sound; and if there is no destiny, then prophetic utterances are no more than childish folly:
When Tweed and Pausyl meet at Merlin’s grave,
Scotland and England shall one monarch have . . .
Merlin’s grave – that Merlin by the way who is not the Merlin of Arthur, but Merlin Sylvester, Merlin of the Wilds, Merlin of the Woods, residing at Drummelzier and roaming Tweeddale, eating grass like a second Nebuchadnezzar – is to be found in Drummelzier kirkyard, under an aged thorn tree. On the east side the burn Pausyl falls into the Tweed, and it so happened that on the day of the coronation of James VI of Scots as King of England, the Tweed was in spate, overflowing its banks to mingle with the Pausyl at the prophet’s grave.
Was that chance or was the prophecy justified? Who can tell? We are to consider, in making a judgement, that in the intervening centuries the Tweed must frequently have flooded, and joined itself to the Pausyl at the prophet’s grave, while Scotland and England remained separate and independent kingdoms.
How my experience this night sets my mind running on such matters, and makes the old ballads run in my head again:
Up then crew the red red cock,
And up and crew the grey;
The eldest to the youngest said,
‘Tis time we were away.’
‘The cock doth craw, the day doth daw,
The channering worm doth chide,
Gin we be missed out o our place,
A sair pain we maun bide.
Fare ye weel, my mother dear,
Fareweel to barn and byre,
And fare ye weel, ye bonny lass,
That kindles my mother’s fire . . .’
The day doth dawn, but the world is aye still, still as a Quaker meeting. I feel I have come through, and know an uncanny calmness for a man ruined and disgraced in the eyes of the world, and for one who has been exposed as I have been tonight. Still, as Corporal Nym has it, ‘things must be as they may’.
Those years of my expeditions into Liddesdale and the other valleys in search of ballads did more, I now see, to form me than anything else I have attempted. They fed my imagination, filling a well on which I have drawn ever since, though I now fear that my credit there too is exhausted. And they formed me also as a social being, for on these jaunts (as we called them) I came to know men and women who share a common ancestry with me, but from whom in other circumstances my way of life would have been utterly divorced. There is nothing so good that does not have its dark side; and with the progress of civilization, we have lost, are daily losing, and will further lose, a sense of the wholeness of our society, an awareness of commonality which we used to have by nature. It cannot be otherwise. When the ballads were made nothing divided lord and hind in their apprehension of the world, or worlds, around them. Now that has vanished.
Now your scientific farmer, with his agricultural textbook in his hand and his head full of theories of crop rotation and selective stock breeding, with his daughters fine in silk and muslin, and his son arguing questions of Political Economy, is a different being, mentally, from the hands he hires.
Or a lawyer like Jeffrey, with his Edinburgh Review and his douce wee suburban estate at Corstorphine – his Sabine farm, as I have heard him call it, though he is less of a farmer, I suspect, than Horace himself could claim to be – with his careful elegant diction, and his society manners – what has he, or any like him, in common with either the heroes of the ballads or the shepherds of Liddesdale today?
He has been a frequent visitor
at Abbotsford, where he is indeed always welcome, for I admire Jeffrey, have a warm affection for him, and would be a hypocrite were I to speak out against the refinement of manners and understanding with which he is associated. Yet I also recall one occasion when this gulf of which I speak, that yawns between the educated and the natural man, was made evident.
It happened that he was with me once when a great snowstorm came on. The winds blew and wreaths piled themselves against the dykesides. Jeffrey observed as we watched the snow clouds gather that the sheep were drawing out from the burnsides and making for the barer high ground of the hill where the drifts would not lie. ‘Are not sheep the most foolish of all animals? Here is a great storm about to come upon us,’ Jeffrey said, ‘and instead of remaining where there is shelter, they are exposing themselves to the full fury of the blast. If I were a sheep, I should remain snug in the hollows’.
Whereupon, Tom Purdie, who had been leaning on a gate as he listened to the celebrated editor, removed his pipe from his mouth, gave Jeffrey a long appraising stare, and said:
‘Sir, if ye were a sheep, ye’d hae mair sense.’
The truth is that every advance of civilization also at the same time, and inevitably, represents a loss, but it was my good fortune while compiling the Minstrelsy to be permitted to inhabit a world in which past and present were contemporaneous, in which indeed the distinction between them dissolved, leaving me entranced in a moment of eternity.
It was not surprising that Jeffrey found little to please him in my verses. He was especially severe on Marmion, a work which I made with the utmost delight, in the full confident exuberance of command, and in the happiness of those years at Ashiestiel. Some of the battle stanzas were composed as I galloped with my regiment of the Light Horse on Portobello sands, or wandered among the hills that divide Tweed from Yarrow. Awareness of my happiness, I believe, permeates the poem, grim though many of the incidents are. I viewed the work with a certain detachment, as is evident from a letter I wrote in the course of its composition to my friend Lady Louisa Stuart, who ever took a close and appreciative interest in my literary efforts. ‘Marmion’, I told her, ‘is at this instant gasping upon Flodden Field, and there I have been obliged to leave him for these few days in the death pangs. I hope I shall find time enough this morning to knock him on the head with two or three thumping stanzas.’ And so I did; and he was thumped merrily enough.